Your Internet privacy is in Congress's hands now

February 24, 2012Your Internet privacy is in Congress's hands nowThe White House plan for a consumer privacy bill of rights sounds good on paper, but real action is still pendingBy Robert X. Cringely | InfoWorld

I had a long talk with the president last week (yes, that president) about how my readers were clamoring for something like an Internet privacy bill of rights so that they could tell those nosy online advertising companies to piss off. What do you know? Thursday morning, the White House called on Congress and the high-tech industry to enact a consumer privacy bill of rights.

Thank you, Mr. President. And thank you, readers, for suggesting it.

All we need now is for the industry to agree on what those rights really entail and for Congress to pass legislation empowering the FTC to enforce those rights. That shouldn't take more than, oh, 30 or 40 years -- maybe 25 with a strong tailwind.

Today's big privacy announcement came on the heels of controversies surrounding Google's bypassing the no-tracking settings in Safari, the callous disregard thousands of companies have for Internet Explorer's privacy preferences platform, and mobile apps that suck up all your personal contacts and store them on their servers without telling you. Also, in a few days Google will start converging all the data it has about you -- your Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, Docs, Plus, what have you -- into one big happy pile of juicy ad-friendly data. It's no wonder people have their knickers in knots over privacy.